Why does a BAR subplot change when I create another BAR subplot on the same figure, in MATLAB 8.0 (R2012b)?

I have a simple code where I create 2 subplots with BAR graphs. When I execute this :

figure

subplot(2,1,1)

bar(round(rand(5,3)*10))

subplot(2,1,2)

bar(round(rand(5,3)*10))

The bar plots are created as expected.

However, when I execute the following code (where 'exampleBars' are my values, which span a large scales):

load exampleBars

figure

subplot(2,1,1)

bar(bar1,bar2);

subplot(2,1,2)

bar(secondX,secondY);

the first bar graph changes unexpectedly. The colour disappeared and the bars are substituted by lines.

Obviously, this is related to the data I am using. What is the problem with the data in the second example?

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The root cause of this issue is that BAR has lots of listeners going on for the x-axis to make it categorical. When working at large scales as in the second example, this functionality does not work very well and there are no workarounds.

A different approach for this case, is to use the AREA plot which does not have any of these issues.

load exampleBars

figure

subplot(2,1,1)

area(bar1,bar2);

subplot(2,1,2)

area(secondX,secondY);